Stay up to date with notifications from The Independent

Notifications can be managed in browser preferences.

Hale Goetz responds after she was fat-shamed on Reddit

'On the right, my hair is shorter, I now have glasses, and I am fat. Get the joke? I was skinny, and now I’m not'

Samuel Osborne
Thursday 31 December 2015 17:44 GMT
Comments
Hale Goetz, 24, was mocked after images of her were shared on Reddit
Hale Goetz, 24, was mocked after images of her were shared on Reddit

A woman has written about her experience of being fat shamed on the internet, after images of her were mocked when they were posted on Reddit.

Hale Goetz, 24, posted her thoughts to the feminist blog Jezebel, explaining how she had just finished her Christmas dinner when a friend phoned to say pictures of her had made the front page of r/funny, a popular subpage of Reddit.

In her article, she says it wasn't because she'd written something funny on Twitter, but "it was because I had gotten fat".

The post linked to a split photo, titled "empowered feminist", which showed a picture of Ms Goetz when she was 16 and another photo taken last year.

She wrote: "On the right, my hair is shorter, I now have glasses, and I am fat. Get the joke? I was skinny, and now I’m not. The likely cause of my weight gain, says the internet, is Tumblr and my (not actually) recent flirtation with social justice."

The picture now has more than 750,000 views, and the post attracted many negative comments.

Instead of getting angry, Ms Goetz says she was confused at why people felt the need to comment about her weight.

"'Well, they’re not wrong?' I said, shrugging on that last word, my inflection suggesting a question. They’re not wrong that I was skinny, and now I’m not anymore. So what?

"I think I look pretty good in that 'after' picture, the one on the right where I am very fat. It’s from when my now-husband and I announced our engagement in June 2014, and it was taken on a MacBook near the best source of light in our shitty Chicago apartment. I think of my lipstick, dark red and painstakingly painted, as a moment of perfection frozen in time.

"If my husband’s face hadn’t been cropped out of the meme, you would see his bushy, red beard and thoughtfully closed eyes ... This is us, happy and cute and in love."

She adds: "To me, being fat is just another bullet point on my list of attributes, something factual but not all that interesting, like how I’m 5’6” or that I dye my hair. But thousands of pictures like the one I found of me exist; I saw them stacked up in piles with my own.

"What is it about us that makes people so mad? Maybe someday being a fat woman won’t feel like a political statement, but for now, I’m happy to exist in accidental defiance: I am happy and I am fat. Let’s eat."

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in